Honey
My mother said I looked like a boiling pot of honey
the way my face broke out when she talked about Jahannam.
Gentle boys ruin in the fire too easily, she said,
they’re najis too, dirty like women on their period.
On my fifteenth birthday, Mother turned the heat up a notch,
telling me, Islam says you’re an adult now.
So she baked a cake made of nectar
and candle wax and forced me to eat it.
Something in me changed that day:
the cake spoiled my stomach that day.
Mother, Mother, who taught you to be this cruel?
To make honey be at odds
with its sweet, sweet nature.
Fight Club
Mothers of Somalia, let your children be free.
Let them go to the party and let them be green
amongst Somalia’s blue and white.
Tell them the truth: that you came to the West
for your sake, for a better life.
Let it be known that you survived and were able
to send money back home because of them.
Your only daughter is coming
out of a strange man’s car fixing her hijab.
And your middle son is somewhere in the dark
kissing another man, while your eldest
is smoking weed with boys whose mothers
have left the door open for them to return.
Mothers of Somalia,
they could be living a better life here
but the same monster that pulled you
out of your mother
lathers around their longing,
waiting for your beautiful
woeful face to love them.
I see them in the city dodging
through a crowd of people —
I sense the loss, the scent
of their displacement swelling towards death.
It is anyone’s guess whether they’ll survive
this wreckage, or find God
on the cold hillside you left them on.
The Great Debaters
I fled my home to be free in 2015
and found myself in your classroom.
I saw the belly of altruism spread
across your desk stretched open
like a plastic bag. It looked so hungry,
and it looked at me, half flirting
and half tipsy.
Mother tore me apart in my room
then turned my older brother into a ghost
and fed my younger brother
till he could no longer walk.
She sold my sister to colonisers
with the same colour skin as us
and killed my father along the way.
But things fall apart during war
and grief oriented me to more
of what the world had to offer.
I can teach you the way, he said,
as though he was a Christian missionary.
But he was certain there was no God
except for the one locked in his head.
And his words started to feel like boiling
water scorching through my body.
I discovered he was wrong
when he stood on a podium
with all the freedom in the world proclaiming
the West had eaten me —
but I ran to Footscray instead of Hargeisa.
And when class was over
and he ushered me to his desk
and insisted it was colonialism
that had made my mother do it,
he could no longer stand so tall in front of me.
For he had sinned like his forefathers
and made it appear beautiful
by confessing his sins
as a racist anti-racist:
a philosophy created by the God chained
in his head, now drunk.
Michael, the old Marxist professor,
the failed North Star, lost in the dark.
He is no Melvin who led his students
to knowledge, but a man crippled
in his ivory tower watching over us
in the East as we scatter
in the pouring rain like ants
seeking refuge from the torment
of a seventh century book
made in the desert
that starts with Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim.
This is an excpert from Magan Magan’s new poetry chapbook Stop All The Clocks. Buy it in print and digital formats from the Verity La La Bookshop.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Stop All the Clocks contains twenty-one poems, each responding to a film that has brought me comfort throughout my life. The title of each poem is borrowed from the title of its corresponding film. In these poems, I draw parallels between the themes of each film and my own life story. This collection serves as a reclamation of my humanity against the apostasy and anti- gay laws in Islam and represents a point of healing after experiencing narcissistic abuse under my mother’s theocratic rule. I write this small collection not as a victim, but as an individual who was once victimised by Islamic tyranny and parental abuse, yet has now been empowered by Australia, which granted me the freedom to enact my natural agency. Through this journey, I have escaped the bondage of man’s enslavement and his continued insistence on living in a state of self-imposed immaturity, even after reaching maturity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Magan Magan was born in Yemen in 1987. At the age of four, after living in Malta for several years, he and his family migrated to Australia. He was awarded a Hot Desk Fellowship at The Wheeler Centre and was co-editor of anthologies Growing Up African In Australia and Australian Poetry Anthology. Magan is the author of From Grains to Gold and the host of the Inner Self Rising Podcast, a show for free thinkers focused on self-development and living authentically.
PRAISE FOR STOP ALL THE CLOCKS
‘This timely, intimate collection, Stop All the Clocks by renowned Melbourne-based poet Magan Magan, is at once emblematic of Australian poetry: bold, accessible and achingly necessary.’
Yvette Henry-Holt
‘The breadth of Magan Magan’s latest collection is both impressive and devastating. Confronting the human condition at its core, this remarkable work explores love, family, identity, faith, and personal resurrection through skillfully constructed verse that is unfailing in its honesty and vulnerability. The use of film to signify crucial moments in the poet’s life creates an intimate space for the reader to become both viewer and witness. This volume is not just a record of survival, but of triumph, revealing a courageous, defiant, and extraordinary poetic voice. Simply, Magan’s finely crafted poems are a revelation.’
Robbie Coburn
‘Ferocious and tender, lucid yet lyrical, the poems in this collection form a heartbreaking memoir that traverses love, loss, triumph, and survival.’
Maxine Beneba Clarke